Photo courtesy of Pat Graham and Tsunami
Hailing from Washington D.C. and informed by its punk rock sound and politics, Tsunami, fronted by Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson, made their mark on the music scene in the 90s with just three records and a handful of singles. The duo were also the masterminds behind the independent record label Simple Machines and its Mechanics Guide, a booklet which instructed the reader on how to put out their own records. Now, Tsunami are back in action with an upcoming tour this spring and a career-spanning quintuple LP, Loud Is As, out now on Numero Group.
I wanted to start right off the bat talking about your experiences working with Numero Group for putting out this new quintuple LP–How did this whole project come together and how has it felt to look back on your entire body of work?
Kristin: We’ve been aware of, fans of, friends of Numero for many years because we know that they’ve been putting out records for more than 20 years, especially unearthing and revitalizing entire catalogs and whole subgenres of music, and it was so exciting to see them do that work even from a distance. Like, oh, look at this cool box set of Detroit soul records and all this cool stuff. But even before Numero existed, we were colleagues, friends with Ken Shipley, who was one of the co-owners.
Back in Tsunami time, we also ran our own record label called Simple Machines and one of the things that people knew us for was this 24-page booklet called the Mechanics Guide to Putting Out Records. Over the years, we sent out hundreds and hundreds of these. Ken was one of the recipients, and he still has his Mechanics Guide, which was just like how to put out a seven-inch, sort of the step-by-step recipe book for it. It was exciting to know that he still had it. It was when, back in that time, he had a little label called Tree Records. So it’s sort of a full circle moment where Ken reached out to us a couple years ago about doing something together, a project, if you will.
We weren’t sure how he would start things. But we decided to start with Tsunami, mostly because we– I mean, this is such a music industry thing, but we own all our own copyrights and all our own sound recording and publishing. So it’s really simple for us to say yes. So that plus the fact that we, in a weird pack-rat way, have lots and lots of ephemera from that Tsunami time period. So we had tons of photos and tons of flyers and lots of paper stuff that we could scan and enjoy looking at again. You know, entire journals from Jenny’s side, things that we could revisit, sometimes painful to read. But exciting to revisit, just to be able to put it all together, sort of condense it for the box set itself.
Was there anything special you unearthed throughout this whole process that you had forgotten about or remembered differently?
Jenny: Yeah, like thousands of things. I literally have something like a dozen old-fashioned suitcases. They’re all emptied now. There’s a list of all of the different people whose letters or ephemera were in there. Over the next year, I’m reorganizing all of them. But yeah, there was just tons and tons and tons and tons of stuff. Like our badges from Lollapalooza, letters from people that you forgot wrote you letters, tons of flyers, lots and lots of photographs… The journals are really helpful too, because we were moving so fast and we were doing so many things at the same time that you forget. It’s all a big mush. I look at a journal and I’ll be like, oh, there’s a Tsunami lyric from the third record and there’s a Liquorice song on the next page and there’s a Grenadine song two pages later and you’re like, oh my God, this is all happening exactly the same time. And our friend Jason Noble, who has passed, wrote beautiful letters and we found them. Or photographs of people we just don’t see anymore. Yeah, but like tons and tons of stuff. I think we used probably like 2% of what we have in the box set.
Kristin: And I’ll say one thing that was surprising that kind of echoes what Jenny just said, which is there were two instances as we revisited a lot of these materials and looked at stuff that we were like, hold on a second. There’s only like six weeks between this important event and this important event.
So the two examples are in 1991 in August we drove out and did shows all the way out to play the International Pop Underground Festival. So Tsunami played shows all the way out there. What a watershed moment– the bands that were playing that event are legendary now like Bikini Kill and Fugazi and Thee Headcoats and everybody. So on the way home, I guess, we decided we wanted to do a festival in DC, which we called Lots of Pop Losers. I’m looking at a poster right now of it –October 26 and 27 1991. So that’s like eight weeks later. And this is pre-Internet! So we had like 14 bands play a two day festival, which I guess we arranged in early September? Two weeks after we got back from Olympia Washington. So that was one thing like, wow, how did we do that? I don’t even know.
Then the other thing that came up as we were looking back at things– we tried to list all of the shows we played on a Google spreadsheet.We have these flyers, and as Tsunami got busier, we also had a booking agent so we also have these old itineraries from tours. So we put it all on a Google sheet and then we’re like, wow, 1993. We played Lollapalooza shows, but also we played like another 150 shows. There were a lot of shows that year. It was also the same year that Simple Machines was running a full year record club called Working Holiday, where we had split seven inches coming out every month and we had like 800 members that we mailed a seven inch to every other month. Also we recorded our second record while in the middle of a tour. So I was like, how did we survive 1993? It must have been a lot of Big Gulps and coffee, I guess. It’s sort of astounding to look at it now. But we did it! With a lot of youthful energy.
That’s so crazy to hear. Backtracking a little bit– Can I ask about your experiences at the International Pop Underground Festival? Because that festival is something I’ve always been so interested in in terms of how it was actually put together and how it even happened because of how insane it was!
Jenny: Well, I mean, we just were the beneficiary of it. So I mean, somebody should do a book on it and talk about all the organizing because it was incredible. It was at all these different venues and there were things that were outside. They incorporated the local pet parade into what was happening and Olympia is just a little tiny town. So it was just so weird. You go to the supermarket and someone from the Melvins would be behind you and Jad Fair would be in front of you. It’s like I’m on another planet! It was so strange. Of course there weren’t places for everyone to stay. I had lived in Olympia for like five or six weeks, the summer before and so I thought, oh, you know, there’s this room upstairs where the recycling is in the apartment building where everybody stays–we could sleep on the floor there! So that was my assumption that we could do that. When I got there, I saw a member of Mecca Normal unrolling his sleeping bag–everybody had had the same idea. So we had to sleep in a tent in the Capitol Theater in the aisle and we had to be in a tent because there were fleas everywhere! The whole theater had all these feral cats in it. Then the second night we slept in someone’s yard because there was no stoppin’ the fleas with a tent. It was just so much beautiful chaos. I want someone to tell everybody’s stories about how weird and wonderful it was and how inspiring the shows at the Capitol Theater were. You felt like the whole place would be a rocket ship and take off into the sky. There was so much energy in there.
Kristin: Yeah, I agree. It was the first thing I’d been to that had that much going on– not only the Pet Parade, but also there was a cake walk and you could win a cake and the Melvins played outside in the afternoon. There were so many cool things about it. I agree that someone should really revisit it and document the amount of effort and ingenuity that went into that particular thing. It’s also interesting to sort of hang it on a hook of history. I mean, the Nirvana record, Nevermind, came out like two weeks later or maybe even a week later. It was the precipice of a very different music world right there.
Going through the entirety of your work, all the records and singles, I noticed there were these really diverse changes both sonically and lyrically across everything. Your music really stands out to me compared to other things that were happening at the time, especially in the Washington DC scene. Who were your immediate influences when you were creating your records and what were you looking to explore with your sound?
Jenny: Well, I think our early inspiration– we were in love with the DC scene. We lived and died by all the DC bands. So they were all inspirations to us. But I think our most immediate inspirations for Tsunami– because when we started, it was really just about joke songs written quickly, just bratty kind of joyful songs. We were very much influenced by Superchunk because we’d just come back from that tour and my band Geek I loved, but it was a lot more complicated. So the idea of doing something more simple was really exciting. Then Andrew, who’s the bass player in Tsunami, had been in a band called Bricks with Mac from Superchunk and Josh Phillips and Laura Cantrell, that just wrote songs at Columbia during their exam week as a way of procrastinating from studying. They would put out these themed cassettes and the songs were great! There were usually two or three gems on these cassettes. So I loved that and I loved the sort of freedom of that. And we loved Scrawl a lot and we loved Beat Happening a lot–both of those bands really put all of themselves into the music, but it’s not about hyper complexity. It’s about a vehicle for their expression. So I think those are the ones that were on our first record.
Kristin: By the time we were putting out the second record, The Heart’s Tremolo, we had closer affinities to some bands from Louisville. Like Jenny was friends with Dave Grubbs who grew up in Louisville and we had played with Bastro. But then Slint put out Spiderland and then we met Rodan who were like, wow! It was like Louisville plus. They were so interesting as a band and as people. It was just so joyous and so wild that there were all those bands. Plus, there were all our friends in DC that were the Slumberland and the TeenBeat labels. We played so many shows with Velocity Girl. We had, by that time, been over to Europe and we had a chance to play with Stereolab and Th’ Faith Healers and other bands that came out of the UK emerging music scene and then it was always delightful to play with Unrest. So there were all these influences, I think, that gave us enough inspiration that we were reaching for other things with the second record. But we had to strip away a bit of the complexity because we were doing what we could within our means as far as being guitar players. So there’s never any blazing solos. We just couldn’t do that. So there were just other interesting ways we could play guitar. We have found, as we’ve tried to relearn these songs, that actually a lot of the guitar parts are only possible because we’re both playing very specific things. It would be impossible for one person to play it. It’s just like, oh, these are actually two, it’s one chord but played by two people. So that’s, I guess, what Tsunami sounds like.
When you were both first learning instruments and learning how to play the music, what made you gravitate towards the guitar?
Jenny: The guitar works. It works. I wrote a lot of songs, and I suppose I could write them on a bass or, you know, Phil Collins writes them on a drum. But I think, I don’t know, most songwriters lean on piano and guitar just because they’re good instruments for writing songs, I think.
Kristin: It’s funny–I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it!
Jenny: You asked us a question that wasn’t the same question that other people asked us. Congratulations. I wish I had a little bell that I just dinged when that happened.
Kristin: It’s funny because, yeah, I’m okay on piano. I can read a little sheet music, but if you don’t practice, you just kind of lose that. I never took any guitar lessons, but somehow I figured out just by watching people and getting a few tips from people enough to get by with Tsunami and enough to like, oh, Jenny has this song idea, we can fumble through and figure out what would sound good to complement it or complete it or whatever it is. So it was a useful instrument for that just because they sounded good together.
I know a lot of what you guys have done has always been very rooted in this idea of DIY. How does that spirit of DIY manifest itself in what you do today? What aspects of that have you kept in your practice as you’ve moved on from Simple Machines and Tsunami and that part of your life into what you do now?
Jenny: I mean, I think it animates like more than 50% of what I do. You know, I’m not the kind of DIY person who wants to build my own house or fix my own carburetor, but, when I came here to Catskill, I fell in love with the music of a guy named Brian Dewan. He does these kinds of wonderful themed shows around holidays and he pulls all of these songs from all these different places. I just decided, I want to do that! Until last Halloween, I had the Halloween show with Brian Dewan, and we pulled some other people in to help us. Or when Tsunami was hanging out last year, because we all get together once a year, a lot of the people, Tsunami and some of the diaspora, some of the partners, we decided that we wanted everyone to make “punk rocks.” So I gathered a lot of rocks from the neighborhood, and we all used paint pens. There was someone who was putting these rocks around, and I’m not mad at them, but they were like kindness rocks, and they were pretty square. Some of them were like, God loves you rocks. I think it’s wonderful that someone’s making weird little art rocks and leaving them for people to find them. But I also thought, why don’t we make some punk rocks that we can leave around. So we all spent hours drawing punk rocks, and then Kristin and I delivered them all around town and left them places. Then I sort of reported on them on social media about which ones were gathered up first and which were the last ones remaining. I think there was a DC flag versus the Germs rock that stuck around for like six weeks. I think those elements of DIY, and even the work at Ford– there wasn’t a portfolio to solely fight for internet rights at that moment and there wasn’t a clear pathway for how to transform the foundation to try to incorporate a tech lens. You know the DIY is just, what’s the first step? How can I learn how to do that first thing? And from the first step, what’s the second step?
Kristin: Yeah, it’s my first instinct if I have a new project to be like, I think I can figure that out. It’s usually something low stakes, like, I can probably figure out that piece of software enough to make a flyer or, you know, make a patch. I got very good at making embroidered patches, not the embroidery itself, but setting it up. I have quite a collection of patches now. So, yeah, it’s the training you got doing Tsunami and Simple Machines and being part of Positive Force Youth Activist Group in DC, it gives you enough of a starting point to be like I think I can figure this out. If you don’t think you can figure it out, you learn pretty quickly, who can I ask that’s part of my friendship network? Who would know about this? How can I involve people that I trust already or know? So that kind of stuff came out of the DIY thing too.
How did you both find yourselves going from these intensive music backgrounds into more technology related paths? What do you find most fulfilling about it?
Jenny: I’m not sure if I would say fulfilled at this moment, but it feels rewarding, let’s say. I think the obvious story is that when we decided to close the label down, Kristin went off and got a master’s degree, and I got a job working at the Washington Post writing the ads for a copy department of like 15 artists. I had a fast internet connection on my desk, which was not a common thing at that time. I figured out how to get my job done quickly, which meant I had a lot of time to just be on the internet. We had a catalog of almost 80 releases. As the music bubble began, a lot of these emerging internet and music companies were looking for catalogs to put on their services to demonstrate that their services work, because the major labels certainly weren’t going to give them any catalog, because the major labels wanted to control their own services. So we were getting all these contacts and we decided we would go and research this and figure out what we wanted to do, but do it publicly, kind of like the guide to putting out records. So for a period of time, we worked with a website called InSound and we ran something called The Machine. We would just interview anybody that we thought was smart about what was coming and we began to create different kinds of considerations that artists could think about and whether we thought making this choice or that choice would be good or bad. Do you want to encrypt the music? Will this company make you sign a contract or can you license it for just a short period of time? Or are they trying to own it? Are they trying to buy it? So when we’re trying to figure out what the right things for artists to do were, you know, is it streaming? Is it a download? Because we didn’t know any of that back then. In the period where we were trying to educate ourselves, the bubble burst and most of the cool companies got eaten up by the bad companies or went out of business. We realized that it wasn’t going to be sufficient to recommend a company to work with or a pathway for musicians to work with because the dust hadn’t settled yet. There wasn’t any trustworthy sense of systems in place yet. So we started a future music coalition to begin to advocate for better systems. We would bring all the brilliant people together and they would talk about streaming services or recommendation engines and back then they were all just theoretical, right? This was just like theoretical ideas of what was going to happen. In that period of time, I realized that artists were losing a lot of power. The value of art was beginning to be enormously diminished and artists were becoming more and more dependent. These channels ultimately concentrated and the people who controlled the concentrated pathways devalued the artist’s labor and took most of the value for themselves. I realized that was coming for everyone and so after doing some work on copyright, I was recruited to go to the Ford Foundation and I made the case that we should have an Internet rights portfolio and begin to understand how that kind of same concentration of power and eyeballs and commercial pathways was going to impact other parts of society. Then Kristin came along for the ride.
Kristin: I mean, I was at the Future of Music Coalition until about 2015. For a few years, I was managing a project called the Artist Revenue Streams Project with Jean Cook, who is a violinist and in the band Ida, and also a Ford Foundation employee. She and I worked on this very large, probably too big of a project where we tried to understand how musicians were making money in 2012, 13, 14. It was fascinating, really interesting work. I’m not sure there was any sort of crystallized answer. It was all very dependent on what kind of work people were doing. But that was, I think, a worthy research project. But simultaneously, I was also doing some other work. Mostly it came into the work I do now through kind of event logistics and organizing fairly large events, which is another thing that you learn by being in a touring band or running a little label or something. So I’ve been at the Media Democracy Fund since 2017. It’s similar. It’s like an intermediary between the big foundations like Ford Foundation and grantees that work on everything from, say, broadband access to disinformation or tackling and combating disinformation. There’s this arc that kind of makes sense, how you get from being in an indie band to this layer of philanthropy and advocacy. It might seem like an odd leap out of context, but it does make sense kind of in that long story.
What’s bringing you back to the touring life and what are you looking forward to in 2025 with this coin flip tour?
Kristin: Well, the fun part is that relearning the Tsunami songs is really fun. When we were touring in the 90s, we were kind of being a little bit selective about what we played and oh these 15 songs are kind of what you always play and you kind of set aside or forget how you play the other ones. We’re expanding what we’re doing on this tour, like, oh, we haven’t thought about this song in a while. It’s really fun to revisit things and remember. So that’s fun. Being able to play shows with our friends in Ida is also fun. The chance of seeing them play every night is exciting to me. When we saw them last year, in Woodstock, it was I think the best show I saw in 2023. And, you know, as we said, it’s like a trampoline for other ideas. How can we bring some whimsy into this adventure? How can we connect with friends we have in all these cities? How can we bring them into this evening? So all those things are possible. So that’s fun to think about.
Jenny: Yeah, and touring is the most fun. I mean, it’s the reason why we wanted to be in a band. We’ve got friends in all these cities and it’s just joyful playing live. It’s going to be great doing it with our friends. We’re inviting friends in every city to come play some of the songs with us. So that’ll, it’ll feel fresh and exciting. It’s wonderful to get to see different parts of the country. I wish everybody in the whole world could spend the years that we spent traveling around the country, just feeling what it feels like to be in all these different places, meeting all these different people who want nothing more than to tell you how great something is about their town, you know?